Wednesday 2 January 2013

EVANGELICALISM

'It is no accident that news media so frequently misprint evangelism for evangelicalism, for the Evangelical understanding of church renewal has all too often been restricted to church growth. Evangelicals have frequently directed most of their critical faculties not at their own needs but at their liberal neighbors' equally strange reduction of renewal to social action, and they have been content to concentrate their energies on exporting the gospel and enlarging their membership. This approach would never have satisfied the Puritans and Pietists, who were convinced that their primary responsibility was to be ecclesia reformata semper reformanda, a reformed church always reforming.'
Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, p.51.